Good food, beautiful room, shockingly bad service.
I can withstand incompetent service or unfriendly service, but not both. Unfortunately at Cafe Boulud that's just what we received. Don't want to get into too much, but there are expectations you are entitled to have when you go to a restaurant of this price point/level, and mine were not met. Slow service, disappearing server seemingly unwilling to describe menu/wine list options, oy vey. Funny thing was that there is an army of manager dudes (all dudes) walking around in suits and not one came by over the almost 3 hours (!) to ask if everything was ok.
The did give us free dessert because it was both my and my mother's birthday, so that was nice. The food was good, but I definitely would've enjoyed it more had the service been anywhere approaching what one should expect when paying a decent amount of money to experience a good meal at a nice restaurant. Also the tacky electronic music filters up from the aptly named "D Bar." OOF.